Sheldon Lu

Artistic interventions in contemporary China

This concluding article examines the ways in which Chinese artists depict, decipher, and react to urbanization in contemporary China. It summarizes several important themes in the cluster of articles included in this special issue of China Information. First, Chinese artists navigate the complex relationship between art and society, namely the tension between the individual aspirations of artists on the one hand and the limits of tolerance in Chinese public culture on the other hand. Second, the artists feel compelled to negotiate with and make sense of the Janus-faced reality of China: rosy images of a forward-looking society as painted by the official media in contrast to the plight of marginal social groups who have not been able to benefit from China’s march to prosperity. Third, the artists attempt to find the right balance in artistic expression between localism and globalization, namely, between the indigenous roots of their art and the pressures and opportunities afforded by the global capitalist economy and the international art market.

Genealogies of Four Critical Paradigms in Chinese-Language Film Studies

A remarkable thing about the rise of Chinese film studies in the English-speaking world in the last 30 years or so is the attendant self- reflexivity of the field. Even as scholars are tackling what appear to be Chinese films, nothing is self-evident or taken for granted. They constantly raise issues about what constitutes the very subject of Chinese cinema(s), what ought to be the range of investigation, what are the appropriate analytical tools and what are the suitable methodologies. This self-inquisitive spirit manifests itself again and again in scholarly publications. Critics with different backgrounds examine the state of the field from various angles and weigh in on disciplinary or interdisciplinary issues of Chinese cinema studies. Theories and ideas come and go. But those critical paradigms that seem to better circumscribe and explain the problems at hand tend to stay longer. It is easy to spot the inadequacies of this method or that approach. But it is far more fruitful, and more daunting, to produce sustained good analysis of particular issues, texts and phenomena in a given field.

Notes on four major paradigms in Chinese-language film studies

ABSTRACT This article examines four major critical paradigms in contemporary Chinese- language cinema studies. It traces the genesis, characteristics, strengths and limitations of each of these theoretical models. Moreover, the author proposes a definition of Sinophone that includes rather than excludes mainland China.

Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China

My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of Chinas arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twentieth century: the Republican Revolution that overthrows the Qing dynasty in 1911; the Communist Revolution that leads to the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949; the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); and so forth. Amid the fiery rhetoric of revolution,…

The Time-Image and the Unknown in Wong Kar-wai’s Film Art

This chapter explores the representation of time in the films of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai. Wong’s films display a strong fascination with temporality, its construction, deconstruction, fragmentation, reconstruction, projection, and retrospection. Memory, nostalgia, and amnesia are recurrent motifs in Wong’s films. His film art embodies the principles of the “time-image” in modern cinema, which is a cinema of fragmentation, self-reflexivity, paradox, double and multiple temporalities, non-linear narrative, and inconclusive endings. Using Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of “movement-image” and “time-image,” the chapter looks at various configurations of time in Wong Kai-wai’s films. It focuses especially on Wong’s informal trilogy: Days of Being Wild (1990), In the Mood for Love (2000), and 2046 (2004), in which Wong uses exemplary time-images to explore problems of time and memory in the changing geopolitical and psychosocial landscapes of Hong Kong, attempting to open up a space for its past to negotiate with its unknown future.

Introduction: Chinese-language ecocinema

ABSTRACT This article is a short introduction to the genealogy, theory and practice of Chinese ecocinema. It situates Chinese ecocinema in the broad context of a general ecological and environmental turn in contemporary humanistic and cultural studies. The article pays close attention to contemporary Chinese-language documentaries that embrace an ecological consciousness. Furthermore, the article zeroes in on a specific Taiwanese documentary: My Fancy High Heels 我爱高跟鞋 (2010) in order to tease out the contestation and tension between the environment, human labor and animals on the one hand and the nexus of global manufacture, circulation and consumption of commodities on the other. The conclusion of the article calls for a flexible transnational approach in ecocinema studies.

Agitation or Deep Focus?: Early Chinese Film History and Theory

These two new books published by the University of Minnesota Press are significant additions to the flourishing field of Chinese cinema studies. The historical periods of the two books largely overlap. They both focus on Chinese cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, the Republican era. They often discuss and reference the same films, directors, critics, and events. It is a beneficial experience to read them together and compare their treatment of certain issues. The two studies join a growing body of lively scholarship on Republican cinema and enter into fruitful dialogues with relevant works.1 Both books

Re-visioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China

This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis repudiates previous Eurocentric narratives of global capitalism and locates China at the center of the world economy in the early modern period up to 1800. Third, China’s revolutionary legacy (what was called ‘Maoism’) and its current ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ in official parlance are considered by New Leftist theorists as a viable alternative to capitalist modernity. Fourth, universal modernity as such is regarded as a social and political imperative by the opposing camp of Neo-Liberalists as modernity is still an ‘incomplete project’ in Chinese history. Overall, such debates are efforts to chart out a cultural and theoretical landscape that does not easily fit in existing models of Western cultural studies that are often based on the colonial and postcolonial experiences of the Anglophone and Francophone world. Global modernity refers to a moment of the breakdown of the hegemony of a Eurocentric modernity and the fragmentation into many cultural spheres of the very idea of the modern without any promise so far of how modernity might be reconstituted and some coherence restored to its claims.... On the other hand, Global Modernity as a concept is also intended to transcend the situation of which it is the product, as this very situation enables the possibility of re-envisioning modernity, rescuing it from entrapment in a vision of history dominated by Eurocentrism and imagining it differently. (Arif Dirlik, Culture and History in Postrevolutionary China: The Perspective of Global Modernity ) 1